Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 165

July 9, 2020: Presidential Medals of Freedom: Jacques Cousteau and Chuck Yeager

[On July 6th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order establishing the Presidential Medal of Freedomwent into effect. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the Medals recipients, leading up to a weekend post on the most recent, most controversial honoree yet.]On two 1985 recipients who embody two very distinct visions of scientific progress.Ronald Reagan awarded a ton of Presidential Medals of Freedom across all eight of his years as president, but 1985 was a particularly striking year (perhaps in part as it was the start of his second term), as it included one of the 20thcentury’s most recognizable and influential figures (Mother Theresa) and two of 20th century America’s most beloved cultural icons (Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Stewart). Those three stood out most among the year’s 16 recipients, but for this post I want to focus on two others: the French scientist, conservationist, explorer, and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau; and the American aviator, flight commander, and test pilot Charles “Chuck” Yeager. Both men began their careers in the military and in similar roles and eras (Cousteau as a French naval officer in training to be a pilot in the 1930s, Yeager as an Air Force pilot during World War II), but the similarities mostly end there; indeed, I would argue that the two men reflect profoundly different ways of thinking about the relationship between science, nature, and the nation.The word that best sums up Jacques Cousteau’s vision of science and nature would have to be “discovery”: his groundbreaking first book and film were titled The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (book 1953, film 1956); in the 70s he published an 8-volume series of books collectively titled The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau ; and in the years following his Medal of Freedom he released a new documentary TV series entitled Rediscovery of the World , to cite just a few examples. When it comes to Chuck Yeager, I would say that the word which best sums up his aviation and scientific achievements would be “barrier”—Yeager remains most famous as the first person to officially break the sound barrier, reaching Mach 1 during an October 14th, 1947 flight in the experimental Bell X-1 aircraft; and for much of the next decade he took part in numerous other record-breaking flights and attempts, individually and with partners such as Jackie Cochran (the first woman to break the speed of sound) and Jack Ridley (his lifelong friend and an engineer without whom Yeager would likely never have broken those barriers). I highlight those two words because they can help us think about a couple layers to the two men’s careers and meanings. Cousteau seems to have approached the natural world as a mystery to be explored, and science thus as both the process of exploration and the understandings that can be developed through that process (but both of which never end). Yeager, on the other hand, reflects a view that the natural world is an obstacle to be overcome, and scientific advancement thus as both the process of overcoming and the technological marvels that can be produced once that process succeeds. Relatedly, Cousteau’s work has consistently been treated (by himself and by his audiences) as for the whole world, which would explain why a lifelong Frenchman would receive a US Presidential Medal of Freedom; while Yeager’s work consistently took place within the aegis of the US military and scientific establishments, which would explain why he continued to fly and command numerous military missions through the Vietnam War. There’s a place and a role for both ways of thinking, but it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I especially admire and value Cousteau’s vision of a world without barriers (whether between man and nature or between nations). Last Medal post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other honorees you’d highlight?

July 8, 2020: Presidential Medals of Freedom: Jesse Owens and Joe DiMaggio

[On July 6th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order establishing the Presidential Medal of Freedomwent into effect. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the Medals recipients, leading up to a weekend post on the most recent, most controversial honoree yet.]On the diverging American stories of the first two athletes to receive Presidential Medals.After John F. Kennedy’s 30 1963 honorees and Lyndon Johnson’s 34 more between 1963 and 1964, things slowed down a bit—between 1965 and 1974 Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford awarded a total of 50 Presidential Medals of Freedom. Those honorees continued to fall mainly into the diplomatic, social, cultural, and artistic categories I’ve discussed over the week’s first two posts, with 1969’s large group (Nixon’s first choices as president) a particularly striking bunch: expected recipients like the Apollo XI astronauts alongside more surprising (if of course just as well-deserved) ones like Ralph Ellison and Duke Ellington. And across that first decade-plus of Presidential Medals of Freedom, one group of prominent and influential Americans remained conspicuously absent—as far as I can tell, no athletes were awarded medals during this era. [Baseball player and WWII intelligence operative Moe Berg was awarded a Medal of Freedom, the less formalized predecessor to the Presidential Medal, by Harry Truman in 1945; Berg turned down the honor.]That trend finally changed in Ford’s second and third (of three) years of choices (he had awarded three medals in 1974, to orthopedic surgeon Charles Lowman, automobile executive and diplomat Paul G. Hoffman, and former Nixon Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird): in 1976, one of Ford’s three medals went to track and field superstar and Olympic standout Jesse Owens; and in 1977, one of his 26 medals went to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Both men were alive but well past their peaks of both athletic performance and fame—the 63-year-old Owens had been retired from competition since the mid-1940s and would pass away four years after receiving his medal; the 63-year-old DiMaggio lived another quarter-century but had retired from baseball in 1951—which made them understandable choices for these first 1970s athletic medals (compared, that is, to more recent or active athletic superstars like Muhammad Ali or Hank Aaron). But despite those similarities in age and stage of career at the time of their respective honors, I would argue that Owens and DiMaggio represent two profoundly different career paths, ones that reflect the fundamentally distinct 20th century experiences and Americas of black and white athletes.In the 25 years between his retirement from baseball and his Medal of Freedom, DiMaggio had become if anything an even bigger legend than during his playing days—from his 1950s marriage to Marilyn Monroe to his namedrop in Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 hit song “Mrs. Robinson” to his 1970s work as national spokesman for Mr. Coffee, DiMaggio was never far from the public eye. Whereas Owens, to quote a passage from my forthcoming book Of Thee I Sing, came home from his Olympic triumph “to the same segregated and racist nation where as a collegiate athlete, despite setting three world records and tying another in a 45-minute span at a May 25th, 1935 meet, he had been unable to receive a scholarship and forced to eat and stay in ‘blacks-only’ establishments when the team traveled. Such discriminatory realities continued to affect Owens after his Olympic triumphs: after he accepted a few endorsements the U.S. athletic association immediately withdrew his amateur status, ending his collegiate career; over the next few years he would have to race against amateurs and horses in order to make ends meet. Moreover, President Roosevelt never invited Owens to the White House nor publicly congratulated him; as Owens put it, refuting claims that Hitler had refused to shake his hand in Berlin, ‘Some people say Hitler snubbed me. But I tell you, Hitler did not snub me. I am not knocking the President. Remember, I am not a politician, but remember that the President did not send me a message of congratulations because, people said, he was too busy.’” While both men were invited to the White House in the 1970s, that is, it’s fair to say that each carried these historical and communal legacies with him.Next Medal post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other honorees you’d highlight?

July 7, 2020: Presidential Medals of Freedom: Walt Disney and T.S. Eliot

[On July 6th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order establishing the Presidential Medal of Freedomwent into effect. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the Medals recipients, leading up to a weekend post on the most recent, most controversial honoree yet.]On a striking, telling pair of 1964 honorees.After awarding Kennedy’s initial Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, Lyndon Johnson immediately chose a whole bunch more of his own: four in December 1963 (including Kennedy himself, posthumously); and then 30 more in 1964. That latter group included extensions of all the categories I discussed yesterday: Cold War diplomats like Dean Acheson and journalists like Walter Lippman (who coined the term “Cold War”); Civil Rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph; inspiring innovators like Helen Keller; and artists of Americana like Aaron Copland, Carl Sandburg, and John Steinbeck. Johnson also honored in 1964 a couple of my favorite early American Studies scholars, cultural critic Lewis Mumford and historian Samuel Eliot Morison, which I highlight here just because I think it’s pretty cool (as was their fellow 1964 honoree, theologian and President Obama’s favorite philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr). But by far the most interesting 1964 recipients, on their own terms but even more so as a reflection of a fundamental duality at the heart of the Medal, would have to be animator Walt Disney and poet and critic Thomas Sterns “T.S.” Eliot. Neither of those men were particularly surprising choices for a 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom. By this time Disney’s film studio had released many of its most beloved animated films, California’s Disneyland was nearly a decade old (and Florida’s Disneyworld about to begin development), and the company and its signature mascot Mickey Mouse were already well established as defining American icons. Eliot was nearly five decades into his acclaimed literary career (which began in earnest with 1915’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and had received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature among countless other honors. But on the other hand, I’d like to push back a bit on Eliot as an obvious selection (which I know was my own framing, but I am large and I contain multitudes). Sure, he was already by this time quite well-established in the canons of Modernist poetry specifically and 20th century literary history overall; but this was an author who had abandoned the U.S. for England, renouncing his American citizenship in the process. While a few of the other early Medal honorees were not Americans (like 1963 recipients Pablo Casals and Jean Monnet), I don’t think any others were American ex-patriates. Not to mention: Eliot throughout his career painted pretty darn bleak pictures of both the United States and the world.Both of those elements certainly distinguish Eliot from most of the other Medal nominees (in those early years and ever since). But I would nonetheless make a broader case that this striking pair of 1964 recipients reflect a central tension in how our collective national conversations (the kind of zeitgeist that a Presidential Medal of Freedom would always in one way or another reflect) engage with our cultural figures and works. There’s a reason why we often describe a cleaned-up, idealized narrative of American history and society as the “Disney version”; as I wrote in many of the posts in my long-ago Disneyworld series, that doesn’t mean that such spaces don’t include compelling ideas or perspectives, but Walt Disney made children his primary target audience, and then turned those kinds of childish stories (in the best and worst senses) into a dominant cultural brand. T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, consistently set out to upend his audience’s and communities’ idealistic or optimistic narratives, as reflected with particular potency by “April is the cruelest month” as the first line of a poem. While it’s fair to say that artistic recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom have tended more to fall into Disney territory, folks like Eliot (as well as Steinbeck and Niebuhr in that same year) illustrate a collective willingness to recognize and honor the darker side as well. Next Medal post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other honorees you’d highlight?

July 6, 2020: Presidential Medals of Freedom: 1963 Recipients

[On July 6th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order establishing the Presidential Medal of Freedomwent into effect. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the Medals recipients, leading up to a weekend post on the most recent, most controversial honoree yet.]The thirty initial recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom were chosen by President Kennedy in July 1963, although they formally received their medals in December from Lyndon Johnson (after Kennedy’s assassination). It was a diverse and intriguing group, but did establish several key categories for future Medal honorees, within the official (Cold War-influenced) framing of “any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”1)      Cold War Diplomats: In keeping with that Cold War national security emphasis, the majority of the 1963 recipients who earned their Medal “with distinction” came from the worlds of diplomacy and foreign policy. That included two of the so-called “Wise Men,” Robert Lovett and John McCloy; UN ambassador Ralph Bunche; ambassador and future Vietnam War hawk Ellsworth Bunker; and “The Father of Europe,” Jean Monnet. The Cold War helped solidify the idea of U.S. foreign policy as “fighting for freedom” around the world, and such honorees likewise connected the new Medal of Freedom to that vision of America’s global role.2)      Cultural Pioneers: That’s not the only possible meaning of “freedom,” however, and the initial Medal recipients also reflected a more domestic definition, one likely influenced by the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Kennedy chose such figures from a number of distinct cultural arenas (along with Bunche, himself a prominent Civil Rights leader): African American classical and opera singer Marian Anderson; Spanish cellist and composer Pablo Casals; and Navajo community and public health leader Annie Dodge Wauneka, among others. Such an emphasis might seem obvious in hindsight, but in 1963 was anything but, and helped ensure that the Medal would be as multi-cultural as America. 3)      Inspiring Innovators: Kennedy’s initial choices also made clear that intellectual and scientific innovation would likewise be rewarded with this new honor, as illustrated by such diverse figures as “Father of Modern Vaccines” John Franklin Enders; lawyer and groundbreaking Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; architectural pioneer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; and physicist Alan Tower Waterman, the first director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). All of those figures were at times controversial within their fields (Frankfurter most of all), an important statement that the Medal would not simply go to safe, consensus choices. 4)      Artists of Americana: But yes, some of Kennedy’s initial choices were indeed such consensus favorites, and in particular I would highlight a few beloved artists whose works embody shared narratives of American ideals: essayist and children’s author E.B. White; playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder; and painter Andrew Wyeth. I don’t mean in any way to downplay the talent nor the significance of these cultural figures, each of whom deserved such an honor to be sure. But they also indicated that the Medal would help reiterate and extend our shared ideas about what “American” means, and where we find it.Next Medal post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other honorees you’d highlight?

July 4-5, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: Of Thee I Sing

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to this special weekend post on the book itself!]I don’t have quite as specific an update as I was hoping, so this late April post on the book contains much of what I’d say here. But I can tell you that Of Thee I Sing has gone into production, that it should be out in late November, and that the cover is likely to contain thesetwo images.And I’ll add this: my 2019/early 2020 book talks for We the People were one of my favorite things from my career to date, and I’d love to continue that momentum for Of Thee I Sing, whether online or in person. So if you have ideas, nominations, contacts for spaces, communities, conversations to which I could connect, I’d love to hear them (in comments, by email, wherever). Thanks in advance!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?

July 3, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: Vietnam, Spitting Protesters, and Jane Fonda

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the book itself!]For this post, I’m gonna share a few paragraphs from my Chapter 7, “The 1960s: Love It, Leave It, or Change It”:
“Complementing and extending such governmental and legal attacks on anti-war protesters were broader cultural myths that depicted the movement as fundamentally opposed to American ideals, ideals that were often directly linked to military service. Perhaps the most telling, as well as the most constructed, of those myths is the story that protesters spit on returning Vietnam War veterans in airports and other public settings. In his book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), Vietnam vet and sociologist Jerry Lembcke traces at length the development and persistence of that myth, despite what Lembcke notes is a thoroughgoing absence of documentation or journalistic evidence for such actions from protesters. Indeed, the only consistent source for this myth is the kind of anecdotal evidence illustrated by Lembcke’s first epigraph, from Vietnam vet Barry Streeter: “My flight came in at San Francisco airport and I was spat upon three times: by hippies, by a man in a leisure suit, and by a sweet little old lady who informed me I was an ‘Army Asshole.’” While individual testimonies like Streeter’s can’t be discounted, they are not only the sole form of evidence for this myth, but are themselves countered by the testimonies of numerous other veterans, including Lembcke himself. Yet the spitting story has not only endured but become a central element to collective memories of the Vietnam War era and its anti-war movement, a testament to the power of such myths depicting protesters and veterans as contrasting and hostile forces within 1960s American society; rather than positioning them as potential allies, an idea for which Lembcke argues throughout his book.
Those myths of anti-war Americans reached their peak with the hostility directed at actress and activist Jane Fonda. Fonda had been involved with the anti-war movement since the late 1960s, and in 1970 along with author Fred Gardner and actor Donald Sutherland formed the group “Free the Army” (FTA), which toured the U.S. speaking to military members about their prospective wartime service. But it was after her Given those myths, it’s worth noting one particularly striking detail of how Fonda has herself told the story of the anti-aircraft gun moment, linking it to her critical patriotism as an American. In a 2011 piece entitled “The Truth about My Trip to Hanoi,” she writes, “The translator told me that the soldiers wanted to sing me a song. He translated as they sung. It was a song about the day ‘Uncle Ho’ declared their country's independence in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square. I heard these words: ‘All men are created equal; they are given certain rights; among these are life, Liberty and Happiness.’ These are the words Ho pronounced at the historic ceremony. I began to cry and clap. ‘These young men should not be our enemy. They celebrate the same words Americans do.’” This moment certainly represented its own form of mythic patriotism from the North Vietnamese, both about their newly independent nation’s histories and about its fraught relationship with the United States. But Fonda’s effort to bridge the gap between the two competing views and nations reflects, as did all of her anti-war activism, a challenge not just to the ongoing Vietnam War, but to precisely the kinds of mythic patriotisms that depict such anti-war efforts as antithetical to—as spitting in the face of—the nation’s ideals.”Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?

July 2, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: The Espionage and Sedition Acts

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the book itself!]On three telling moments from the histories of the extreme 1917 and 1918 laws.1)      A Xenophobic Argument: It’s easy to imagine that the Espionage and Sedition Acts were a direct offshoot of the U.S. entry into World War I, and that was indeed the timing of their passage by Congress. But in truth, President Woodrow Wilson had been making the case for such laws since at least his December 7th, 1915 State of the Union address (at a time when he was still entirely opposed to the U.S. entering the war). In that speech, he argued, “There are citizens of the United States, … born under other flags but welcome under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life … I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in so doing I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation.” “Pour the poison of disloyalty into the arteries of national life” is perhaps the clearest image ever created in service of the argument that to criticize America is to be unpatriotic and treasonous—an argument that is often most potently deployed in wartime, but that as Wilson here reflects goes far deeper than those moments (and is very often used to target immigrants in particular). 2)      A Totalitarian Clause: When Congress did pass the two interconnected laws (after a couple full sessions of debate, with the Espionage Act passed in June 1917 and the Sedition Act in May 1918; it does again seem likely that the U.S. entry into the war offered the final push), they were just as extreme, in both language and ideology, as Wilson’s request would indicate. Exemplifying that extremism is the Sedition Act’s goal of banning “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States ... or the flag of the United States.” The entirety of that quote stands out as (ironically but definitely) un-American in its attack on both free speech and dissent, but I would highlight the final clause in particular: any nation that makes it illegal to say negative things about its flag has at that moment, I would argue, taken a significant step toward totalitarian fascism. I’ve written before (and do again in Of Thee I Sing) about the gap between narrative and reality when it comes to the Pledge of Allegiance—but even the most celebratory version of the Pledge doesn’t view it as a legally binding statement of blind worship of that item itself. That’s where the Sedition Act took us.3)      A Ridiculous Court Case: Such extremist language might seem more for show than for action, but in fact these laws were used to prosecute Americans in a number of disturbing ways. None was more absurd than the attacks on the Revolutionary War-set silent film The Spirit of ’76 (1917): the print was seized by the government for portraying the English (now America’s WWI allies) too harshly, and the film’s producer, a Jewish American immigrant from Germany named Robert Goldstein, was sentenced to ten years in prison; at the sentencing Judge Benjamin Bledsoe told Goldstein, “Count yourself lucky that you didn’t commit treason in a country lacking America’s right to a trial by jury. You’d already be dead.” I’m not sure anyone was lucky to be living in America in the age of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, a moment that truly reveals the destructive potency of our most extreme visions of patriotism.  Last patriotic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?

July 1, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the book itself!]On three patriotic layers to Julia Ward Howe’s influential Civil War anthem.1)      Inspirations: As is pretty well-known, Howe composed “Battle Hymn” (initially published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862) by setting new lyrics to an existing tune: the music to “John Brown’s Body,” a Civil War marching song that may in turn have been based on William Steffe’s “Say, Brothers/Canaan’s Happy Shore” (although there were and remain other potential sources for “John Brown’s Body” as well, including ironically enough the minstrel show songwriter Thomas Brigham Bishop). Whatever the precise history of that evolving tune, its role in Howe’s creation reflects her desire to link her new patriotic anthem to both the history of abolitionism (and violence in service of that goal) and the unfolding war. And her most immediate inspiration made those links even clearer: it was after Howe and her husband, the reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, visited President Abraham Lincoln in the White House in November 1861 that she came up with the idea to compose a song of support for Lincoln and the Union cause. 2)      Themes: One of the most interesting things about “Battle Hymn” is also the reason why I define it (in my book’s Civil War chapter) as a unique example of celebratory patriotism: that its original lyrics do not explicitly mention America at all, focusing largely on religious references, such as the famous opening line, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Those are interwoven with images of war that are both symbolic (“His terrible swift sword”) and specific (“the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps”). Yet the title links both war (Battle) and religion (Hymn) to that American Republic, and in so doing turns the entire song into a celebration of an idealized, blessed nation. Because of that multi-layered link, the song’s most repeated phrase, “His truth is marching on,” while certainly and centrally referring to God, likewise describes the progress of Lincoln and the American cause in the Civil War. Indeed, Howe envisions that national cause as nothing less than a holy text, as illustrated by the third verse’s striking opening line, “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel.”3)      Recruiting: Howe’s battle anthem wasn’t just inspired by those rows of steel, however—it also helped inspire more of them. In 1863, for example, the Philadelphia-based Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments re-published the “Battle Hymn” as a broadside, seeing it as nothing short of a case for the enlistment and service of men in those newly forming regiments. In my World War I chapter (on which more tomorrow) I write about the most famous patriotic recruiting image in American history, the James Montgomery Flagg “I Want You” Uncle Sam poster. But given the vital importance of the Civil War African American regiments, it’s fair to say that no recruitment effort was ever more crucial than that one—and Howe’s patriotic anthem played a role in that pivotal Civil War and American turning point. Next patriotic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?

June 30, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: Francis Scott Key’s Anthem

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the book itself!]
On a historical context and predecessor that adds an interesting layer to our troubling anthem.Thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick’s protests and their linkage of the national anthem to questions of race and equality, a good deal of recent attention has been paid to Francis Scott Key’s largely forgotten third versefor “The Star-Spangled Banner” (to be clear, only the first verse is sung at most occasions). While music historiansdiffer on exactly what that verse’s brief and somewhat oblique reference to slavery means, it seems pretty clear to this AmericanStudier—especially when coupled with Key’s also largely forgotten status as an early 19th century slave-owner—that Key was at the very least leaving enslaved African Americans out of his mythologized celebration of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” I’m already very much on record as not-a-fan of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and none of these close reading and historical contexts make me any more likely to belt out Key’s anthem (even if I could perform the notoriously challenging song).Those aren’t the only contexts for Key’s song, however, and a very different one offers a distinct way to historicize and AmericanStudy the anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” wasn’t the first set of lyrics that Key had set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s popularBritish work “The Anacreontic Song”—nearly a decade before, Key set to the same music his song “When the Warrior Returns” (1805), a tribute to Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart, two military leaders returning to the U.S. from the 1801-1805 First Barbary War in North Africa. Originally published in the Boston newspaper the Independent Chronicle on December 30, 1805, “When the Warrior Returns” precedes the national anthem in more than just tune, especially in the line, “By the light of the Star Spangled flag of our nation” but also in the repeated closing couplet, “Mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave/And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.” Clearly Key was not about a little recycling when it came to his patriotic song-composing efforts.Remembering this prequel to “The Star-Spangled Banner” offers another and more important historical context, however. As I wrote last year for my Saturday Evening Post column, the War of 1812 itself can be analyzed less as a heroic defense of America from British invasion (which had largely comprised my limited understanding of it) and more as an international conflict closely tied to U.S. territorial expansion. Engaging those sides of the War of 1812 might also help Americans add the entirely forgotten Barbary Wars to our collective memories, since those Mediterranean conflicts (and especially the 1815 Second Barbary War) hinged on many of the same international, territorial, and nautical issues and debates that helped cause the strife with England. Which is to say, “The Star-Spangled Banner” didn’t just represent an evolving, Early Republic patriotic vision of American identity—it also and not coincidentally represented an extension and deepening of U.S. presence and influence on the global stage. George Washington might have warned his countrymen in his 1797 Farewell Address of “foreign entanglements,” but our national anthem reflects just how fully entangled we would become over the next couple decades.Next patriotic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?

June 29, 2020: Patriotism’s Contested Histories: Ben and William Franklin

[Later this year, my next book, Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism , will be published in Rowman & Littlefield’s American Ways series. So this year’s July 4thseries, I wanted to highlight a few of the contested histories of American patriotism that project includes. Leading up to a special weekend post on the book itself!]On why it makes sense to define a Loyalist as a patriot, and the limits of that perspective.Perhaps the most controversial claim of my book comes in the first chapter, “The Revolution: Declaring and Constituting a Nation.” As I do in every chapter, I move there through examples from that time period of my four focal types of patriotism—celebratory, mythic, active, and critical—and when I get to the final/critical patriotism section, I start with a few examples of (I have to assume) a surprising community: Loyaliststo England (or Tories, in the language of the time). I’ve long argued that it makes sense to see the Revolution first and foremost as an American civil war, and wanted to flesh out that idea further by thinking about how we might see Loyalists as expressing a critical patriotic perspective toward Revolutionary America. I focus on three particular figures: the Maryland landowner James Chalmers, whose 1776 pamphlet Plain Truth offered a Loyalist rebuttal to Paine’s Common Sense; the Mohawk Iroquois warrior and chief Joseph Brant(Thayendanegea), who led Native American and Loyalist Anglo soldiers against colonial forces; and William Franklin, the Royal Governor of New Jersey and Ben Franklin’s illegitimate (but fully acknowledged) son.William’s story is profoundly specific and individual, not only because of that fraught relationship to one of the Revolution’s most famous figures and leaders, but also and even more intimately because of how affected his relationship with his own son, (William) Temple Franklin. Temple was already apparently closer to his grandfather than his father as of May 5th, 1775, when Ben and Temple arrived in Philadelphia after having spent a good deal of time together in London; the Revolution, and specifically Temple’s role as a diplomatworking on the colonies’ behalf, further strained William’s relationships to both his father and his son. But I would say that those personal details also reveal an overarching truth: no Loyalist would risk and damage all that William’s choices did (and that seems to have been the story time and again for Loyalists) if they did not believe that they were acting on behalf of their communities. William was imprisoned for two years due to his Loyalist beliefs, and when he was released he continued those efforts, organizing spiesin New York City in opposition to the Revolutionary forces there. The latter actions seem to fall more within the category of treason (aiding a wartime enemy, etc.), but I think it’s impossible to separate them from William’s longstanding commitment to what he saw as the best future for New Jersey and the colonies.“Colonies” is a key word in that final sentence, though—however we see William’s actions and life, there’s no way to describe him as a patriot to the United States of America. That’s not because the U.S.A. did not exist yet—in fact the Declaration of Independence opens with the frame, “A Declaration by the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled,” meaning that as of July 1776 at least the U.S. did exist—but rather because the America in which William believed and for which he fought and sacrificed so much would never have become the full political and national entity comprised by that phrase. Certainly for most of my book, it is the U.S. that is the subject of the patriotisms—critical and otherwise—that I’m analyzing, so I grant that in some important ways the patriotism of Loyalists has to be seen as separate from that overall topic. But as of the Revolutionary era, none of those concepts or communities were quite established yet (much less set in stone), and so I continue to think there’s great value in considering a variety of forms of American patriotism from that period—including the critical patriotism of Loyalists like William Franklin. Next patriotic post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other moments or stories of patriotism you’d highlight?